1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid ejection apparatus such as an image recording apparatus, for example, a printer.
2. Related Art
In general, a printer to be an ink jet type recording apparatus has an ink cartridge mounted on a carriage including an ink jet type recording head and employs a method in which the ink jet type recording head carries out printing upon receipt of the supply of an ink from the ink cartridge.
However, the printer of this kind has the capacity of the ink cartridge to be mounted on the carriage which is small, and cannot correspond to a comparatively large amount of printing for an office or business, for example. For this reason, there has been employed a method in which the ink cartridge is not provided on the carriage but on the ink jet recording apparatus body side, and a subtank is mounted on the carriage to supply an ink from the ink cartridge to the subtank (for example, see Japanese Patent Publication No. JP-A-2002-1980, FIG. 1).
Moreover, the ink jet type recording head provided in the printer has such a structure as to receive data on the type and residual amount of an ink charged in the ink cartridge, a serial number and an expiration date from the ink cartridge, thereby ejecting the ink properly.
For this reason, the ink cartridge is provided with an IC chip storing the data and a communicating portion for transferring the data in contact with the IC chip is provided in the printer. The communicating portion has such a structure as to be connected to the ink cartridge.
More specifically, the IC chip of the ink cartridge has such a structure as to supply data on the type of the ink to the printer through the connecting terminal of the communicating portion.
When the connecting terminal of the communicating portion is to transfer data together with the IC chip of the ink cartridge, they are to come in contact with each other.
For this reason, the data cannot be transferred until the position of the IC chip of the ink cartridge and that of the connecting terminal of the communicating portion are accurately set. Therefore, there is a problem in that the positioning is to be carried out accurately.
Moreover, data are varied every ink cartridge. Therefore, it is necessary to provide, in the communicating portion, the same number of connecting terminals as the number of the ink cartridges. Consequently, there is also a problem in that a cost cannot be reduced.
On the other hand, there is also a problem in that precision in the transfer of information is reduced when the information is transferred in non-contact without using the connecting terminal.